Exploring the historical antecedents to present day nationality and immigration restrictions in the UK, Sara Cosemans brings together burgeoning neoliberal ideology and nostalgia for empire in the 1960s and 1970s to explain how race and citizenship interacted. The politics of Enoch Powell, and his impact on policy, offer the ideal case study.
This is the first piece in a series titled Moving People. In exploring how people on the move are labelled, remembered, and constrained, it offers new understandings of the experiences (and inconsistencies) underpinning issues of immigration and asylum.
To mark Census Day 2021, Helen Sunderland looks back to 1911 when the state mobilised schoolchildren to help number the nation, tracing a history of contradictory attitudes to children’s citizenship that persist today.
How did 1970s New York become a laboratory for a grand experiment in ‘returning streets to the people’? Mariana Mogilevich argues that street life and politics in Midtown Manhattan became central to the inception of a new form pedestrian citizenship.
This virtual special issue of History Workshop Journal tells the histories of states in their interlocking national, international, local, and archival dimensions, and as political and legal contestations of sovereign power.
David Saunders (Queen Mary) offers a vivid and unsettling insight into scientific and medical perceptions of homelessness during the Second World War.
In light of the recent “Windrush scandal”, Kennetta Hammond Perry asks what aspects of British history are extolled, and which facets remain illegible in popular renditions of the Windrush narrative – and offers up alternative “usable pasts” to understand Black people’s relationship to British citizenship.
